TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

TitanHq host the solution and I subscribe to it. I forward our email to them and use them as an incoming and outgoing email gateway.

I now get hardly any spam. I run a small email and web hosting business with about 30 clients. They were always complaining that the proprietary spam systems that I had weren't working, and we were always chasing our tail trying to clean it up. People who are involved with email know that most spam comes from people who indiscriminately sign up to email newsletters and the like. But user behavior is difficult to change. The old system that I had, the native system on the email server, with a couple of plugins that were involved, was just not doing it. It was fairly effective, but I was still getting lots of spam. Now, that is basically gone. 

When TitanHQ first approached me, they told me that with SpamTitan our spam would disappear. And they're absolutely right. It has. And not at the expense of genuine emails either. It really has changed the whole spam issue. I get no customer complaints about spam anymore from those people who have signed up with my organization.

Before I started using SpamTitan, my spam system was quarantining about 800 emails per day, and a lot more were getting through. Now, my spam system quarantines maybe two or three per day. That's how effective it is. My own spam system isn't really being deployed because everything that comes into the server has already been cleaned sufficiently. That means the SpamAssassin that I use along with the email server really doesn't have to deploy at all, which has a positive effect on server and its CPU load. The email server is able to be in the business of relaying email, as opposed to checking everything and having to put things in spam folders and quarantine folders.

Another really excellent benefit, and this is not client-dependent, is that all outgoing email is now checked for spam. That means I have an extra security check on what happens on the server. There are between 300 and 400 email boxes on my server, and it only takes one person to be sloppy with their login details and somebody can be using the box to relay email. Just yesterday, there was an example of that. SpamTitan caught it and stopped about 300 emails from going out. That was a bonus because I wasn't expecting to have outgoing emails covered as well, but they are.

The fact that it does exactly what it says on the box is what I find most valuable about SpamTitan. They've reduced our spam by about 99 percent.

SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things.

There are also delivery limits, something like five emails per minute per mailbox. They do that, they say, because they want to maintain compliance, but I can't configure that. I can't be more aggressive about that if I want to be. 

Another example is that I have a couple of clients that send out membership emails, and that causes some problems because we're not able to configure SpamTitan to enable those emails to go smoothly. I have to do a work-around at our end for that.

There are a lot of parameters that, if I want changed, I've got to ask them to make the changes. In short, I'd like them to make it more configurable. To be fair, it's a small price to pay for what they're doing for us, but a bit more ability to configure limits would be good.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for between six and eight weeks.

The stability seems to be absolutely spot-on. There are backup and redundancy strategies involved. If one server is down, there's another one available. I have never been aware of the backup MX record having to be used.

The proof in the pudding is really our customers' feedback because, had there been any problems in terms of stability, I would have heard about it from our own customers. We've had no complaints. The only thing I have heard from our customers is, "Thanks for doing whatever it was that you did." I have managed to take the credit for what SpamTitan is doing for our clients. There have been no issues at all in terms of stability or reliability.

I'm offering the incoming mail spam prevention as a premium add-on to what I offer to my clients. I have four or five clients that are up and running with it, and another three are on a trial. But for the price point that I'm at with SpamTitan, I could probably take on another 15 clients very easily. Our business is very small in volume in terms of what a company like SpamTitan are dealing with. I don't envisage any problems with scalability, even I were to double over the next year.

At the moment, for outgoing email the solution is monitoring about 300 email boxes, and for incoming email, about 50. If more of my clients sign up for the premium offering that I've suggested to them, to cut down on their spam even further, I would like to expand usage of it. I'd like to sell it to all my current clients.

I'm still learning about what they have to offer. We're using SpamTitan as a blunt tool to stop spam, but there are so many other things that are on offer. I have probably only scratched the surface. I haven't really spoken to anyone at length yet, other than the salespeople, about the other things that are on offer, because of time constraints on my part.

In terms of getting to a resolution, and in terms of professionalism, TitanHQ support is first-class. They're not very user-friendly, but I can deal with that. That's a common thing in the IT business. But they are professional and efficient.

SpamTitan is the first external email gateway that I've ever used, so I can't compare their support with its competitors. I could compare it with a payment gateway, like Worldpay for instance, which I use for one of my clients. Worldpay has a great offering, but their technical support is a bit brusk and monosyllabic and not always very helpful. Compared to Worldpay, SpamTitan are much better, with the caveat that, as I noted, SpamTitan aren't all that user-friendly. Sometimes IT people can appear as if they're being put out a bit when you ask them questions about the product. I can live with that. At the end of the day, as long as they provide a resolution, I'm cool.

Positive

The setup and ease of use are an eight out of 10, where 10 is easiest. They set up most of it for us. I had to do some work at our end on DNS and it was sorted. That was easy enough.

There's a wee learning curve to the user interface but it's easily negotiated, and once you understand it, then it's fairly straightforward. I would rate the overall intuitiveness of the solution at seven or eight out of 10.

Part of the reason that there was some difficulty for me at the very beginning was that I didn't quite understand how the product worked. At that time I was really only interested in the end results. One phone call got that sorted out. When I started to understand how it worked, it made it so much easier for me to understand how the configuration was put together.

I did a trial that was supposed to last for a month, but I signed up after a week because it was working so well. Getting it set up was fairly time-consuming because each domain that was added to SpamTitan involved tedious work with the DNS. But the setup on the SpamTitan side was relatively easy and very quick to deploy.

What it is doing for us at the moment is more than value for the money that I pay. I've already recouped the cost of the solution from my customers who have signed up for it. 

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

• given me less work to do
• knocked down the number of support calls
• totally eradicated support calls for spam.

And the net cost at the moment is absolutely nothing. I do realize that the cost will go up if more of my clients sign up for it. It's not something I'm looking to turn a profit on. Still, financially, it has already helped the business because we've got more time to devote to other things since we're not putting out spam fires constantly as we did before.

If all of my clients were to sign up for it, it would be worth about £5,000 pounds a year in extra income for me.

As a small business, every penny is counted here. All businesses have had problems over the past couple of years with the pandemic. I really thought that something like SpamTitan would be more expensive, but it cost me about $70 (or about £60) a month. I'm more than happy to pay that.

I looked into other solutions, but most of them were in-server, a piece of software that I would have to buy a license for. I would have to be responsible for the configuration of them as well, which would mean upskilling on my part and my employee's part. One of the other solutions I looked at was a fairly big multinational company. The thing that got me into SpamTitan was that they cold-called me. That gave me the thought that, "Oh, there are cloud solutions like that out there. Let me have a look to see what they are."

After having done a bit of research and due diligence on SpamTitan, I went to the SpamTitan website and found out that, with two clicks, I could set up a trial so that's what I did. I couldn't do that with the competitors. I was getting it for free for a month to try it on a couple of domains. They were quite happy to extend that if I required an extension, as I was learning how to cope with the system. They were very confident that it would work and, in fact, it did. 

I didn't do as much research as I might have done otherwise because I wasn't thinking that it was a mission-critical thing. It was just a thought at the time that something like that would be a bit of a luxury. It would cost me some money but might be quite useful. I have since found it to be far more useful than that.

My advice is go for it. Absolutely. I really have no hesitation saying that at all. With a lot of software solutions it's usually "horses for courses." How they work depends on your workflow. But with SpamTitan, it's absolutely a binary situation. There are no ifs or buts. It stops the spam coming through and it's amazing.

This sounds hyperbolic, but it's easily the best purchase that I've made since I started this business, 15 or 16 years ago.

I have paid for things, and sometimes I think they're a waste of cash but I'll keep them in place because there might be some small convenience involved, but this solution is really well worth it. I really was pinching myself at the beginning and wondered, "Is it really going to be that effective?" So far—and it has only been six weeks, so there's always that caveat; maybe there is some disaster that's ready to befall me down the line somewhere—honestly, it's just been superb.

It's definitely a 10 out of 10. I have some issues with the technical support, but when it comes to spam detection it would either be a zero or a 10 for me. It hasn't reduced my spam by half—even that may well have been worth the money that I pay for it. Rather, it has cut it out altogether.

The only spam that I get now, doesn't go through SpamTitan. There are some fairly clever spammers who manage to email directly and bypass SpamTitan, but I very seldom get spam. What I do get all seems to come from New Zealand, strangely, and not from the usual suspects, like the Far East or Russia. It's very much in the Southern hemisphere. But what I do get is minimal.

We are using it as a gateway antivirus. It is for spam protection of our Exchange Server.

It offers gateway protection. It allows our Exchange Server to be hidden behind the network. It limits the exposure to our Exchange Server. 

It saves me an hour a day by not having to go through people's spam. It gives me a little bit of confidence knowing that we have the ability to very quickly block out attachments that we don't want, such as macro-enabled spreadsheets or even HTML files. It's a big vector. It's very easy to configure to block and graylist a lot of things that we see coming in as a vector for email attacks. So, it gives us much better security overall, as well as some time savings on the administration side.

Content filtering as well as Link Lock, which is URL parsing, are valuable, but anti-spam would be the biggest feature to help reduce overall spam for the company. It allows users to control what spam gets quarantined, etc. Before we had SpamTitan, it was me going through 300 emails a day to whitelist or release items from quarantine, and now people could do it themselves. It has literally saved me an hour a day just doing that.

The interface is a little dated aesthetically. I know that's a small thing, but it could use a little bit of a facelift. 

The only other thing is to have more flexibility for multi-domain environments, but I don't know if it is technically possible. Currently, the sending and receiving is limited to your one domain. If you need to split the sending of emails through using different certificates, you don't have the ability to do that. So, multi-domain flexibility would be nice. Outside of that, technically, I haven't found any problems with it.

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

I had some issues with the last update. It was a little concerning at the time because we could see the emails queuing up in the system, and we couldn't understand why they weren't being released to the end users in the backend. A quick call to support again fixed that. So, there was a hiccup, but the support was there to assist. We were back up and running within 10 to 15 minutes.

I can't really compare its stability to our previous solution considering the fact that we didn't have anything that we managed by ourselves. We don't have anything to compare it to because the Exchange Server handled all the spam before we had this. Exchange is just as stable as sitting on a three-legged stool. So, I would say that it's stable.

We haven't run into that in terms of disk space and other things to see what it would take to expand it beyond its usage. Currently, I see scalability as not being a problem. If I needed to add more resources to the virtual machine, I could in a heartbeat. Licensing is easy to add on. It's just a support call to pay for more licensing, which is also cost-effective. So, I see it as being a scalable product.

In terms of our plans to expand its usage, we are always growing as a company. We're always adding more demand onto it just through natural hiring and expansion. It's still meeting our day-to-day needs.

They're very responsive. They don't have a phone number to call. You have to email them in order to get that phone call. The lack of a ticketing type of help desk setup is the only thing that is a stumbling block, but otherwise, they are very responsive.

Positive

On the government side of things, they used to use URL parsing as well. I can't remember the name of it. It was a big one, but they dropped it because it was so expensive, and we couldn't afford to pick it up. This has link parsing as well, and it still comes with the appliance. 

Its deployment is private. We host it on our own. It's with our own environment. The way we have it deployed is that we have all of our locations across the province. We have VPNed into one central location where we host all of our servers, our Exchange, etc. The SpamTitan appliance sits on that central network, and from there, our email would come in again over the internet or through the government, and then it would go through the appliance to the Exchange Server. That's it in a nutshell. We have a hyper-conversion infrastructure with HP SimpliVity. So, it's sitting on a virtual machine running on VMware right now.

Its initial setup was straightforward. Their documentation was very thorough. I had it all set up as a virtual appliance before I made a call to them to help run through the rest of the setup. They had it up and running within 10 minutes.

There is a very small learning curve. Their support is good. They do call you within a reasonable time. There are a lot of settings in this appliance that can be confusing or inundating to people that aren't familiar with the terminologies or the technologies. So, it can be a little bit intimidating, but I found that for the basic setup, for what you need, it works really well. For any of the advanced tasks, it's only a matter of going to the website to find out how to configure it.

In terms of the ease of use being a factor when deciding to go with SpamTitan, if it's something complex, I would expect good support to be there to help me through it, and if it's something simple, then all the better. So, I don't usually worry about setup as long as support is efficient enough to deal with it. In this case, SpamTitan was, so I didn't find it at all hard to set up or configure or go through the settings. We were up and running in about 10 minutes, so I'd consider that pretty good. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of ease of setup. 

In terms of updates, there are updates that become available probably three times a year. I've only seen it once since we deployed it. So, that maintenance is required to update, but otherwise, the system is pretty self-sufficient.

We have 100% seen an ROI. We see something come in through a single vector, and we're able to squash it before it does any major damage. On the administration side of things, it's amazing. I can move on things a lot faster with SpamTitan. When I see an attack come in, I can easily stop it in its tracks and prevent it from moving forward really quickly. It has absolutely been a godsend.

Its pricing is good. It's probably one of the most competitive anti-spam and anti-malware appliances out there for email. I was doing some looking around for pricing before I came to SpamTitan, and for the feature set, the price is very reasonable and competitive.

There is an additional cost to Link Lock for link parsing. That was a separate add-on. It's called SpamTitan Plus, and that's how they bundled it. We opted to have that protection as well.

We were trialing Darktrace just to see what it would do. It was decent but grossly expensive. It was tethered to another product that we didn't have a need for. So, we did a trial of that product, and we did have some other experience with the government solution, but this one, we manage ourselves. It does a very good job for the price that you're paying for it. It's very cost-effective.

There is a free evaluation option. Take it and try it out. It's easy to slip into your network and see how it works before you buy it. The support team is there to help you everywhere in between. Try before you buy. That's the best advice that I can give, and chances are you'll like it.

We are currently not using the geo-blocking feature because we are receiving our email through a smart host, where all the emails are filtered through the government to us. It only appears as one geo-location. Another reason why we decided to go with this kind of appliance or virtual appliance was that we're moving away from that platform, and we'll be wide open to the internet, and we didn't want our Exchange Server completely exposed. Within about two months, this system will be handling all External emails from across the world, and we will be geoblocking some countries known to be big malicious users.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It does its job, and it allows me to pivot in ways that I didn't think I needed to before. If I cared more about the looks, I'd probably give it a seven, but in terms of functionality and how it works, I don't have a problem with it. It works really well.

We use TitanHQ to provide email security. It sits on Office 365 and protects all emails coming into our domain and going out of our domain.

We have been able to reduce the spam count and the number of phishing attacks, which were higher before we started using SpamTitan. Our reputation has also improved because our internal and external clients are happy with the level of protection provided by this solution.

We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature to block spam emails entering our network and servers. We have created rules to block certain emails, and the geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 100%. 

I would give a ten out of ten for the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country.

Our employees don't have to sort through junk and spam emails now, which saves time. Also, they have the option to release and whitelist emails that have been placed in the quarantine folder. It's a user-level feature. It has substantially improved our efficiency by 70% to 80%.

We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan.

We've been using this solution for two years.

SpamTitan's stability is good; I'd rate it at eight out of ten. In comparison, I'd rate the stability of Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP at six or seven out of ten.

TitanHQ's technical support staff respond quickly to our emails, and they've had the right level of expertise to handle our concerns or issues. I'd give them an eight out of ten.

Trend Micro's technical support is at the same level as that of SpamTitan, whereas Microsoft's technical support is at a lower level. We have experienced delays with Microsoft.

Positive

We previously used Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP. SpamTitan has the edge over Microsoft ATP because it is more user-friendly. Microsoft ATP was very complicated to configure, but SpamTitan can be customized for our own requirements.

SpamTitan helped us to deploy the solution, and they maintain it as well.

SpamTitan has competitive pricing and flexible licensing. They allow up to 10% more that you use and then add it to the next tier of licenses.

We evaluated Trend Micro and Symantec email security and chose SpamTitan because it is user-friendly and cheaper than the other two products.

I would recommend SpamTitan and rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

Our primary use case is as a secure email gateway; the solution scans our emails for spam and viruses and does URL link rewriting. SpamTitan makes sure our incoming and outgoing emails don't contain anything problematic.

Before implementing the solution, I had 13,000 to 14,000 sitting in my Deleted Items folder on 90 day rolling average. The figure after implementing SpamTitan is 8,000 to 9,000 items in my Deleted Items folder on a 90 day rolling average, so it's stopping thousands of emails that got through before.

We are part of a larger University organization, and many spam emails come from the broader organization. They run Office 365, and there is spam it doesn't catch, despite user reporting. SpamTitan filters out the emails Office 365 misses, for the most part, as no solution is 100% effective all the time.

SpamTitan is flexible and highly configurable. 

The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. It's simple, and it works; we pick a country, and the tool blocks mail from that country. There isn't a list of countries to select from, we have to type in the country name, and it brings up matches, which is a little cumbersome, but it still works quite well. The feature is good to have, but we don't see a massive influx of emails being blocked. 

A huge feature for us is the link rewriting configuration; we can set exemptions for link rewriting from particular organizations. The rest are rewritten and checked against the SpamTitan database of problematic sites and email sources. The user is notified of the outcome of the check, which is excellent when it's hard to determine if an email is legitimate or not.   

The solution saves employees' time. Many of our faculty are physicians who don't have much time to check their emails, especially if they need to scroll through and delete spam mail, which can hide important messages. A cleaner inbox is easier to use and saves time, probably an hour a week per user. That might not sound like much, but we had physicians with inboxes so full of spam they stopped checking their emails, which is no longer the case. Our catch rate is up significantly, and our false positives have dropped considerably, saving the end user time.

The interface needs to be improved; some elements aren't where I expect them to be, so it could be more intuitive. 

The solution isn't intuitive enough for me to go in and write specific rules and exemptions.

We have been using the solution for about nine months. 

The stability is excellent. We filter 45,000 to 50,000 emails a week through the solution and haven't had any server issues. Physically rebooting the primary server causes a failure to the backup server, which is how it is supposed to work, the stability is solid.

The solution is highly scalable and easy to scale. The appliances are straightforward to get up and running and to add to the system. A few clicks and checks are all that's required.

The customer service is outstanding. If I have a question, I can open a ticket, and they usually get back to me within hours. They can also remote in if I turn on remote access, so they can fix what needs to be fixed or tell us what we need to do to resolve our issue. Their support is fantastic.

I can send TitanHQ a ticket with the information of a rule that requires updating and provide them remote access to our system via a code. Usually, within 24 hours, their rule post developer will have come in and provided a solution for us, which is incredible.

Positive

We previously used GFI MailEssentials, but it wasn't being updated. It was almost two years since their last update. They updated their filters and virus database regarding the software, but that's it. We saw an increase in spam getting through, and my team and I spent more time releasing false positives. GFI didn't work well in our multi-exchange server environment and didn't perform as we expected.

We looked for another solution, did a POC with SpamTitan, found it impressive and decided to implement it. One of our requirements was an on-prem option due to HIPPA regulations regarding information sharing, which narrowed the selection down. Another requirement was a solution that sits in front of the email as a gateway. This further limited the selection, and SpamTitan was the natural choice.

The deployment is very straightforward. TitanHQ provided a knowledgeable staff member to support our deployment, and it was clear he was very experienced and wonderful to work with. He was patient and made an excellent first impression. The initial setup required two people, myself and the staff member from TitanHQ, and it didn't take long. We set up two appliances and a failover solution, which we did over three separate meetings of an hour each during the first month of the POC. By the end of the month, I was ready to purchase, and no further setup was required.

The solution is very lightweight in terms of maintenance, we've had one major update over nine months, and that was a click of a button to download and install. We can set updates to auto-install, and the minor updates, including antivirus definitions, happen by themselves. TitanHQ puts a lot of effort into maintaining SpamTitan on their end.

I don't have any precise numbers, but I would say the product provides an ROI. An intangible ROI is decreasing the footprint for a phishing or some sort of email related security attack.  By doing such a good job of weeding out the bad messages we reduce the number of potentially harmful messages making it to the users inbox.  We train our users on how to spot spam messages, but that is not full proof.  By significantly catching more spam messages and rewriting the hyperlinks this has further reduced the chances of someone mistakenly interacting with a bad message.  Thus increasing our security foot print.

The pricing is very reasonable. I know the cloud version costs more because of active 24/7 monitoring, but we take care of that as our setup is on-prem. SpamTitan is in line with what we were paying for GFI MailEssentials but works much better.

I don't remember what other solutions I considered. The person I worked with from TitanHQ was fantastic; they helped me with the POC and any information and advice I needed. That was one of the main reasons I didn't dig much further into other solutions.

I would rate SpamTitan a nine out of ten. 

Typically, we don't see large amounts of spam stopped by geo-blocking, but we have the feature activated for a few countries, the major players. 

We don't use the geo-blocking exemptions feature because we block the whole country at this point; we don't have business dealings with other countries.

SpamTitan is an excellent product; the only issue is with the UI, which is somewhat dated. TitanHQ is working on updating it, however. I would advise users not to be discouraged by the UI because the solution works well; it's a solid option.

We use it in our email flow against spam and other unwanted emails.

We are a company that provides video interpretation for the deaf and the hard of hearing. We also do in-person and relay services. Communicating with that large percentage of people relies heavily on email. We need to ensure that we have a good, solid way to filter out any unwanted emails or spam.

We're very pleased with SpamTitan and the functionality that it has given us.

It has saved us money and time. First, it's catching things that might otherwise have gotten through in the past. That was when we were working with a different solution that didn't put emails through two antiviruses before they got to our system. Any suspicious or malicious activity that's being caught in our system isn't coming from email. When you get viruses, it's very costly, and that is where it has saved us time and money. The suspicious links aren't coming through anymore and we don't have to warn people not to click on them.

Before, we would go through tickets that said, "We got this," and I would look at those tickets and wonder, "Did they click on the link?" It would end up being a phishing email and we'd have to scan our systems. We don't get those anymore. That means it's not just saving employees time, because now they don't have to put in a ticket when there is a link in an email. It's also saving time for all of us who are administrators of the spam solution because we don't have to investigate and put a block in because it has already been filtered out.

I don't know what the percentage difference is between our spam catch rate now and what it was, but I know it is very high.

We have not given our end-users access to the portal. If they have spam issues, they put in a ticket and one of our admins looks into it for them in SpamTitan. It's worked so well that we've hardly had to do that. In the last year, we may have had to go into SpamTitan half a dozen times, whereas before, we were getting those kinds of tickets and having to go into Barracuda at least four to five times a week.

One of the features I really like is the layout of SpamTitan.

It also gives us more control over the spam functionality. We were able to customize the emails for our end-users. Branding things is very important. It makes it so easy to manage and change, as we've merged with other companies and we're now using a standardized name. There are some more changes coming up and, from what I've seen, it looks like making those changes is going to be very simple to do. I really appreciate that.

It took some adjustment and some getting used to when it came to where to add the users and the general layout. It wasn't very logical or intuitive. That functionality was under the Anti-Spam Engine instead of Domain or User Policies.

It could be a cultural thing. I'm in the U.S. and the solution comes from Ireland, and cultures are very different in how they label things. It wasn't very logical for someone in the U.S. in terms of the labeling of the tabs and finding where to do things. We also came from a tool where things were labeled a little differently. But once you get used to it, there are no problems at all.

It would help if we could customize it a little bit. But that issue is so minute.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for about a year.

The stability of the solution is a 10 out of 10.

It's very scalable.

We have a couple of thousand users and we've deployed over multiple different domains, all going through SpamTitan. The fact that it's so easy to put a new domain into the system means there's no problem with the scalability at all.

TitanHQ's support has been phenomenal. Not to downgrade anyone, but when we would contact support for our previous solution, we wouldn't get any response. It took six to eight weeks to even get a response. With SpamTitan, we get a response within an hour or two.

You don't have to wait and wonder if you're going to get the attention you need. They're on top of it. Even if you don't get an answer right away, they still respond to you so that you know you're on their radar.

I would rate their tech support a 12 (twelve) out of 10. They could definitely teach a lot of people about soft skills and customer service, because they're wonderful.

I've only had to contact them twice over the last year because the tool runs so well. One of those occasions was because of the security certificate issue and we just needed a little guidance. The second one was to get on their radar to make sure that the specific KB articles were applied and they reassured us they were. And when we checked, they were. They were just simple questions.

If you compare their tech support to that of other solutions, they rank among the best. I've had to contact tech support for Cisco, for Zoom, and for many other solutions. Even though Zoom has rated fairly high, SpamTitan is still higher. I would give Zoom a seven or an eight out of 10, but SpamTitan is definitely way above that. I have not come across many solutions that have come close, even outside of spam solutions, other than CrowdStrike's technical support. They do get back to you, but they're still not at the top of the game. SpamTitan's tech support is at the top of the game.

Positive

Initially, we had Barracuda but it didn't give us all of the features we wanted and they also upped the price by four to five times the rate we had been paying. It also wasn't user-friendly. They had not changed its interface in so long that it was archaic. In addition, it took more time when we needed to block something. With SpamTitan, you just put it in and it's done. Barracuda wasn't as easy to work with as SpamTitan is.

I started looking for alternate solutions.

I found SpamTitan, which had actually been around longer than Barracuda. It had better reviews and more features that we needed and functionality that we wanted, for a reasonable price.

It's also light on the maintenance side.

I led the deployment and the only bump in the road we had was with deploying the security certificate. When we reached out to TitanHQ they gave us direction and it was resolved within two hours. The bumps in the road weren't because of SpamTitan and they really quickly gave us direction and we just ran with it. All in all, it was very simple to get everything deployed.

We did have a person at TitanHQ who worked with us. When we did the actual deployment, we had a meeting with that person and it went off very smoothly.  It was after the fact that we found we had an issue with the security certificate and that's when I contacted support.

I was on the deployment call as well as the person who manages our cert and our Exchange Servers, our director of networking, and our CIO.

I can guarantee you that we have seen ROI if only because it's blocking the phishing links. That one piece alone saves time and money. Instead of the long and complicated process of having to investigate a link, company-wide, to make sure that it didn't go anywhere, I've dealt with just one instance since we put in SpamTitan and it wasn't a real phishing link. It was just something we needed to block so it wouldn't annoy people. 

The fact that it's catching phishing links is one of the biggest benefits. If somebody were to click on one of those links, not only could they bring in a malware infection, but they could give people access to our data.

I love the pricing of SpamTitan and they don't price gouge. 

The reason that they can be so reasonable with their cost is that they don't have to spend a lot on support. It's such a stable product that you're not needing to contact them that much. If their customers don't need to call support every other day, they can give them a solution that is cost-effective.

As a company, our rates are controlled by the government. The fact that we're able to get a solution of this magnitude that we can actually afford means anybody would be a fool not to do it.

We narrowed it down to three options: Barracuda, SpamTitan, and one other. 

My advice would be "Do it." It's simple. If you want a spam solution that, number one, is going to work, this is your solution. And if you do have issues, you're going to be able to reach someone to get them taken care of without question. You will have very little to do once it has been implemented and it gives your environment a lot of security. What you want to do is use SpamTitan.

This is a phenomenal solution.

The reviews I read about SpamTitan where people would talk about all the good things, and that there are no negatives, are factual. They are that good. It's just wonderful.

We use TitanHQ SpamTitan in our organization and deploy it as a service for our clients. The primary use case is as a spam filter and for email sandboxing, which allows suspicious emails to be isolated, safely analyzed, and deleted if necessary. We have used the sandboxing feature for a month and implemented it for our clients instead of Microsoft 365 Defender because it's now included in the SpamTitan solution.

We realized the benefits from day one because it filters out all the spam emails. That means we don't need to spend time examining or deleting spam emails because the product does that for us.

The overall system is straightforward to use, and the UI is excellent. It significantly streamlines the process of dealing with spam emails.

We previously used a Barracuda anti-spam product, first as hardware compliance boxes and then as virtual machines. SpamTitan works better for us as an MSP, and the pricing is right for our SMB customers.    

It's very easy for us to do business with TitanHQ. They have a no-nonsense attitude, provide good support, and their financial department helps us out. The system works well, and they take care of us.  

The MSP setup differentiates TitanHQ from other providers. We don't make any investments as it's a hosted solution. It is there for us to implement for our clients and profit from it. 

There is a significant productivity gain from filtering most spam emails away from end-users. These days, clients expect their MSP to have high-level solutions, and SpamTitan works perfectly.   

I don't know precisely how much the geo-blocking feature reduces our spam intake, but it's a substantial amount of spam that never gets to us.

SpamTitan's general configuration works well, and we use the geo-blocking feature for several clients who require geofencing. It's a feature we don't necessarily need very often, but it's there and works well if specific clients want geofencing in their solution. 

The solution allows us to set up exemptions and whitelist certain agencies which don't follow standard email rules. This is sometimes the case for government clients, for example, a tax agency.  

SpamTitan saves employees' time via automated spam filtering and threat protection. If customers use the built-in Office 365 email protection, they must decide whether an email is spam or not. SpamTitan does that for us and offers excellent security due to its high threat intelligence. I would say the product saves us at least an hour a week and profoundly impacts our catch-rate. We need this solution, as our stats say 50% of all emails coming through our domain are spam. 

As a Danish company, it would be great to see a Danish translation for the UI.

We have been using the solution for approximately two years. 

We haven't had any stability issues, so I would give the product a 10 out of 10 here.

SpamTitan is much more stable than other solutions we have used; as a web-based solution, TitanHQ more or less runs it for us. We don't have any issues to deal with, which is vital for us; we need a solution that is highly stable and just works.

The solution is scalable and easy to scale. If a client expands from 25 to 125 users, the only change is in the billing; we don't need to lift a finger.

Within our organization, we only have one department, but our clients usually have several departments that use Office 365. This makes it straightforward to set up and manage SpamTitan. Our average customer has about 25 users, and we have 60 to 70 customers, so that's 1500 to 2000 total end users.

Our technical team is delighted with the support. They make a phone call or send an email and get help immediately. TitanHQ offers excellent support.

This is the first MSP solution we have used, but when running Barracuda, we had to do everything ourselves. Sometimes that wasn't easy, but SpamTitan is an out-of-the-box solution, and we are pleased with the support. It's one of the main reasons we chose the solution. 

Positive

We previously used a Barracuda solution and switched because it wasn't easy to handle as an MSP. TitanHQ built their product with the MSP in mind, so the system works very well for us. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. I was involved in our deployment, but only as a test user. The technical team handled the implementation, mainly changing an IP address in the DNS, and the solution works right out of the box.

The deployment in our organization took just a few hours. We have 70 client companies with about 25 users each, which took more time to change the DNS for almost 2000 users. That took us two weeks. 

SpamTitan was easy to set up, configure, and use; we had help and instruction from TitanHQ, which was a key factor in our decision to go with them.

It took one of our employees to carry out the deployment, and it took him just a few hours to teach the other technical staff how the solution works and how to maintain it.

The solution gives us an ROI because we pay TitanHQ per user and charge clients per user with a mark-up for us to profit. It's a very simple system.

The price and the licensing are fair, allowing us to make a margin on the product. We paid a one-time fee for the sandboxing feature; apart from that, it's just the standard licensing.

Our technical team evaluated some other options, but in terms of ease of use and a web-based solution, SpamTitan stood out to us very quickly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

All of our emails go through SpamTitan, so there isn't scope for us to increase our use.

I would advise anyone to implement this solution, it's so straightforward, and we have never had a problem with it.

It feels like we have a little bit more control with SpamTitan than we had with our previous solution. We have a little bit more insight as to exactly what's going on in the cloud. We get full logging of those mail servers. It's been great.

In addition, the solution's integration with IMAP was a big reason we went with it. While it didn't really improve our organization, it mitigated a ton of setup work we would have had to do if we had had to go with something else.

And the reporting is something that has made our business run more efficiently.

Our false positives have gone up, but what we have found is that people actually really like seeing a lot of emails denied and then being able to allow them, as needed. That's been great. It gives them more control over what's coming in.

There are two things I find extremely valuable. They are among the most important things for ongoing administration purposes.

The first is that the product offers both inbound and outbound spam filtering and it enables amazing reporting. It's very specific and very easy to track down.

For example, if somebody calls us and says, "Hey, I'm having a problem not getting an email," or, "I'm having a problem sending an email," or, "I sent an email and it's not showing up," the discovery work to resolve those kinds of things has gotten so much easier because we can see what's going on right at the edge of our incoming and our outgoing email. A regular tech support dude can log in and type in very little information about what the customer is calling about, and get a very practical view of what is going on from address to address or regarding a subject line. They can filter on all sorts of different things.

That's probably the most important feature because we do get a lot of people who question our mail service. Now, unlike before, those requests don't come to me. They're very easy for our tech support department to look into and give the customer an answer right then and there.

The second valuable feature is built-in rate limiting. I haven't played with it yet because we have our own rate-limiting solution built into our mail solution on site. But when that needs an update or when that stops working, you better believe that's going to be something I'm going to lean on in the cloud because it's already there. It's already set up. I will just have to type in what we want it to do. That is a value-add. And my boss, the CTO, spoke up and was excited about that as well.

The admin user interface is very granular. Anyone who is in IT can relate to the statement: "With anything granular, there is going to be a little bit of complexity." It can be difficult, on a layer-by-layer basis, to wrap your head around it.

Because the administration interface is so granular, some of the categories and some of the settings end up in really odd places. It's hard to figure out where a certain setting is sometimes. I brought up the issue to our sales guy and, from what I understand, they're working on that.

But it's also something I can appreciate because it gives me the flexibility to delegate control to anyone in our organization, whether it be us, as the global administrator, or our tech support people and I only want to give them access to certain domains. I can also give control to a customer who registered a domain through us and who wants to manage their own domain. I wouldn't say it's super-intuitive, but it is granular.

Also, a little bit more email that is categorized as "clean" is coming through nowadays. But with that said, it's doing a great job at blocking a lot of the more obvious, blatant spam—the newsletters and the marketing stuff that you can usually unsubscribe from. Those are the types of emails that 90 percent of people don't want. But compared to our last spam filter, it does let a little bit more email through that is categorized as "clean."

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just over one year. Just a few weeks ago we got our one-year renewal.

It's been extremely stable. Everything that it uses has worked. It has built-in error alerting and that has worked. That has told us about what's not working or what's filling up. We're happy with it.

From one to 10, where 10 is "most important" in terms of our requirements for this kind of solution, stability is a 10. That's our number-one priority. We have about 18,000 users in total, and if the solution goes down we start getting a lot of calls.

From my understanding, the solution is in AWS and TitanHQ can very quickly stand up extra virtual machines and add them to the cluster. The scalability is infinite. I have zero worries about scaling.

They have amazing tech support. They went above and beyond. During setup, they gave us templates for our end-user customers that we could put our name on. They trained our tech support guys. They also reach out once in a while and say, "Hey, it looks like you have an update available for your server. Do you want us to do that, or do you want to do that?" They're very nice. They're not too pushy or annoying. They actually add value, which is a breath of fresh air.

I wish everyone would care and respond the way these guys do. I can't think of another example of where I have been impressed by a vendor's tech support. I have very low expectations when it comes to tech support, typically. They generally do not add any value. I usually feel that I need to pick up that slack and be that person. It's been great that I can actually throw a question out to them and get an answer in layman's terms; something that I understand. They will go above and beyond and actually offer a little bit extra when they reply. That's nice because I don't know their product. They're trying to teach me a little bit more about it so we can both win.

Positive

We started with a product called Roaring Penguin. We ended up getting forced out of that solution due to some company buyouts. They were purchased by AppRiver. The thing that was unique about Roaring Penguin was a very unique way of authenticating our users, which we wanted to keep consistent.

We wanted to keep our infrastructure intact and not have to build anything new. A lot of the new spam filters required some sort of LDAP authentication and we were using IMAP authentication. It was great when we found out that not only was SpamTitan less expensive than a lot of the other solutions, but it was very granular and allowed us to do things that we had been doing already with our previous spam filter.

In terms of the stability of SpamTitan versus Roaring Penguin, they are both very good.

I've been dealing with email since I was a teenager, so for me the setup process was really intuitive. Email, for the most part, is black and white they allowed me to set this up in phases and to test it in phases. I had all the confidence in the world, when we were ready to cut over to it, that it was going to at least flow and that everything was going to work correctly. Everything was tested and from there it was just a matter of tweaking things. I didn't need help to set it up, so overall, I thought it was intuitive.

When setting it up, we had a rocky start with just a little bit more spam coming through than we previously had. That was expected to a certain degree because we didn't move a lot of our rules over to it. Our users had done custom whitelisting and we had no practical way of moving that over.

SpamTitan tech support did a great job at giving us a generalized solution for that, which people actually preferred. It was more of a, "We'll catch everything and you guys let through what you want" approach. That has done just an outstanding job. We've been hands-off since the first couple of months and it's been great.

The prep work for the solution took about a week. After that, it took about another two weeks. Week two was cut-over and dealing with some of the extra spam that we were getting. In week three, I focused on outgoing spam filtering, and that also took a little bit of support.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, most requests get funneled my way. There have been things delegated to our tech support department. They have been given training directly by SpamTitan, which I thought was really cool. The training was also recorded and we let our new hires watch that training. There aren't a lot of escalations that come my way. I don't even hear about 95-plus percent of the tickets because they're able to whitelist or blacklist something on behalf of a user very quickly. Beyond that, I get involved with things like a spam campaign. I track down where it's coming from and how best to block it.

We evaluated AppRiver and SolarWinds' Spam Experts. We went with SpamTitan because it was the only one with IMAP authentication. But it was not only that. They had a name out there and good reviews. I felt good about using them.

My only advice is that if you're forwarding email to external addresses, and also make use of the outgoing email filter, you may want to test that scenario.

We are focused on the MRR and the MSP revenue is the main one. This shifts the relationships to long-term with our customers. Our aim is to raise the bar of the customer satisfaction and value we provide.
SpamTitan is a natural add-on for our portfolio of MSP and MSSP offerings. We love upsells, so all the customers will eventually be offered the other products from TitanHQ, but it will be step by step. Usually, it takes time to onboard a new customer. We distinguish technologies, processes and people onboarding. This is the reverse order by importance, but the right one in the timescales.
Spam protection is not a new thing on the market and most customers have some other solutions in place. When we replace another MSP, we inherit agreements that can't be cancelled today. We onboard customers with many different technologies, so we have to provide service for them and wait for the contract to expire before we can replace that technology.

We use SpamTitan to reduce to amount of time our clients' employees spend on spam emails and protect them from malicious links and attachments to improve overall IT security. These are the primary use cases. With inflation in salaries, we don't want to waste the time of our customers and employees. Also, even if we provide IT security awareness training, some people may still click or respond to something in the wrong way. The e-mail channel is still the prefered method for virus distribution.

Every employee faces an avalanche of emails daily, so one doesn't want to make the picture worse. It is preferable to remove as much as possible and still have that self-learning mechanism.

Most potential customers worldwide are aware of spam and malicious emails, so it's an easy sell. We don't have to convince them or provide a lot of use cases. It's enough to compare the competing solutions and what they can do. 
We use SpamTitan in-house, and we recommend it to our customers. We don't have to explain how it will impact user productivity. They know it's something essential. If they don't have an anti-spam solution, they must deal with a lot of spam, which is very time-consuming. A standard office user spends between 30 and 120 minutes daily sorting through emails.

It becomes more effective as time goes on. Users receive reports and provide suggestions about what to do. After a while, the system learns what is safe or malicious, becoming more precise with fewer false positives.

SpamTitan is perfectly suited for MSPs. It's easy to use and sell. It's also straightforward to configure and monitor. In my opinion, software developers at TitanHQ did an excellent job with SpamTitan. 

There are some minor technical aspects of the portals and management interface that could be improved, but there's nothing that prevents us from doing the job. 

Most of the cloud-based service providers allow us to dive deeply into all the customers from a single console. Currently, I can only see our company on the console and not any of the customers, i.e. a multitenancy approach is required for every partner portal tenant. A single pane of glass.

The geo-blocking features could have more customization options. For example, our technical operations are based in Bulgaria. Same for VMware Bulgaria, HPE Bulgaria, etc. If you geo-block India and Bulgaria, there is no way to communicate with the HP call centres.

SpamTitan will be busy with the tricky parts and not the basic ones. If you install and start using SpamTitan, where the IT maturity is low, you'll have a lot of false positives, and it will ask the user for suggestions. The customer might say, "Actually, this new product is not very good. It's asking me for everything." I would say, "Yes, it's because your organisation didn't do your job before that."

In other words, SpamTitan isn't the whole solution to the problem. SpamTitan needs someone to sort out the IT security audits and rectify the discovered issues or vulnerabilities to ensure all the prerequisites are there. After that, SpamTitan will do a proper job, but not every managed service provider or IT company understands that well. Again maturity is critical and it is applicable against MSPs, not only the customers.

I used SpamTitan in various roles for the last few years. We are a relatively new MSP in the UK, but the Bulgarian MSP has been in business for 21 years.

Email isn't real-time communication, so no one will notice if an outage isn't more than half an hour. I've never had any complaints from our users or customers. I would assume there were no outages at all. If there were any outages, they went unnoticed.

In 2018, I experienced an issue with a SpamTitan competitor, it was out for around an hour. An outage could have a potentially high impact. Just imagine if you stop the email service to your sales team. Most organizations will survive if they can't use email for an hour, but not all of them. Still, the negative impact will increase with the time of the outage.

SpamTitan is a cloud solution.  They've got a significant customer base worldwide and should have the experience of scaling out and scaling up already.

We have no concerns about scalability. Our existing customers are stable and don't expect a significant increase or decrease at the moment. There are always fluctuations, but we don't foresee significant changes. Our expectation is a gradual increase in the client base and more consumption of the SpamTitan service.

I rate TitanHQ support ten out of ten. We needed help only once, and the issue was resolved in a day.

Our team love the whole experience of partnering with TitanHQ. It's exceptionally smooth. Most of them are of the mindset that they want to respond as soon as possible. Everything is seamless. If any of us need an answer, we just shoot them an email and get what we need after a couple of hours. It's simple, and the billing is sorted out, so I don't have to think about it. Everything is automated, and I've got the correct reports. It's no hassle and a considerably valuable is presented to MSPs and end customers.

Positive

The only competing solution we used was Mimecast. The technology is fine and it works, but the pricing is prohibitive for some customers. Especially the archiving and the pearl in the crown is the data download from the archive.

Most customers use Mimecast to archive, but it's painful financially to move on from there. Other customers only use M2 due to the reasons above. They're much easier to migrate to SpamTitan. There are many other email archiving solutions, that provide a similar service.

There's no significant difference between SpamTitan and Mimecast from a technology perspective. They probably overlap 90 per cent. There are some minor differences that are insignificant. It wouldn't play a huge role in a customer's decision. However, Mimecast is significantly more expensive for the whole solution.  

SpamTitan is stable, and the support is doing its job as expected. We only opened one ticket the last year, and it was sorted during the day. It is a pragmatical decision to move to SpamTitan, considering all the factors.

Setting up SpamTitan is extremely easy. Some customers have the technical knowledge to set SpamTitan up, but in general, they preferer to use an external partner for the implementation. Everything is on the cloud. You only need to tweak a few DNS records and provide the proper training to the end-users.

The deployment is straightforward. Sometimes, we have to help the customer to sort out a mess internally before they can set up our solution. The deployment takes around an hour or two if you only need to update the DNS records. If you've got all the data from the customer and you only have to apply the changes, you need an hour or two. Afterwards, you have a period of initial support where you hold the customer's hand in case something is wrong. Generally, it's straightforward and quick. In the worst-case scenario, it takes 24 hours. The end IT user training may take longer.
One person is usually enough to handle the deployment, but we may require an additional person with experience with the customer's email servers. For instance, they might need specific knowledge of Office 365, Exchange Online, Gmail corporate edition, etc. If there is an issue with a client's email servers, we might assign another person to help if the first one is unfamiliar with the email server technology.

Business organisations aren't paying salaries for their IT users to fight spam. Even if each user only spends 15 minutes daily moving all the spam to the junk box, they can multiply that by each workday for the whole year. Any spam solution will cost just a fraction of the payroll wasted.

The time to value depends on the scale of the organization, but a client will probably see a return in the first year. SpamTitan needs to be trained to determine what is good and bad. How long? It depends on the organisation.

In other words, a single customer would need to compare the wasted employee time for the learning period. After that, they don't have any more wasted employee time or at least it is significantly reduced. SpamTitan is sorting out that issue for them for free. It's a huge gain of the work time back on their business.

The benefits start immediately after implementation. IT users can see all the daily reports of how much spam they receive. They've got the control to say, "Release that email," "Allow this email," or "Block this email." They start to teach the system. In the beginning, they're happy to do that, but eventually, they get bored. Fortunately, the system begins to do most of the work itself. After six months, the value is almost at 85 to 95 percent.

After a year, it is close to 100 percent of its value. If you want to use an anti-spam solution, you should expect a minimum of three years before you get a proper return on your investment. The first year is spent making the system aware of what's happening. You've got the real value in the second and the third year. It makes perfect sense when you spread the value across all the years.

The price of SpamTitan is reasonable and it makes sense. The end customer pays for the license and the professional services to us to set up the whole solution. Usually, it's part of a much bigger project.

I rate SpamTitan a ten out of ten. It's an easy sell. The price is insignificant compared to the money the customer saves. They also have an insurance policy with high protection against reputational risk. It mitigates so many other risks for the organization. A modern organization needs to have spam protection and the overall maturity of the UK market helps to shift the conversation from "Do we need such a solution?" to "What solution is best for us?"

SpamTitan MSP model has adapted well for MSPs to resell the subscription and get the money from the customer to pay it back to TitanHQ. The support is good and quick. SpamTitan does the job and ticks all the boxes from an end-customer point of view and a managed service provider perspective. They deliver real value to both parties.